Digital Nation and Multi-tasking

Nov 22^nd 2010

As I write this, I have facebook open, I’m listening to music, I’m texting on my phone, and I’m reading my notes. Obviously, these four things cannot be done simultaneously, but I’m doing them in conjunction with one another. I’ll write a few sentences, and then reply to a text on my phone. I’ll write a few more sentences, and then change the song that’s playing. After that maybe I’ll check facebook then I’ll get an idea from my notes. I know from personal experience and from a video we watched in class that multitasking is not an efficient way to go about things; it actually makes the tasks take longer. This is because it takes extra time to switch back and forth between tasks rather than just doing them in succession with one another. People, especially students, believe that they are great multitaskers, when in fact they are not doing nearly as well as they could because they’re so distracted with technology. In the video Digital Nation, an MIT professor gave a test that was very straightforward; all of the students should have gotten 100%. The average score was 75%. According to this professor, multitaskers are distractible, have a poor memory, and it may be creating people who are less intelligent. For myself, I knew that I wasn’t the greatest multitasker, even now as I write this, I’m having trouble ignoring everything that’s happening around me. I want to text, I want to look at facebook, and I don’t like the song that’s playing! It’s very difficult to just focus on one thing at a time because as a society we’re used to being bombarded with information all at once. In my English class during the past few days, we’ve been discussing the effect of technology on society and how it shortens our attention spans and makes us want to do multiple things at once! According to Neil Postman, the average television news story is only forty-five seconds long. How can these newscasters present us with information that is apparently life-changing and world shattering in only forty-five seconds? If this story is so important, why don’t they devote more time to it? The answer is because people would get bored; they can only put up with only one thing going on for so long, they want a change.

The video we watched in Educational Psychology also discussed how some schools are integrating technology into their everyday learning. They argue that students “need to be fluent in technology”. I agree with this to an extent. It is important for children to understand how to work a computer, because the future of the world revolves around computers.  However, I do not think that they need to be using computers for every little menial task just because the computers are available. When I become a teacher, I expect technology will become even more prevalent than it is now, and I will most likely have to use a lot of technology in my classroom. I’m not completely opposed to it, because let’s face it, I love my iPod, my laptop and my cell phone; however,  I hope that it’s not going to be the most important strategy for teaching.